flash bios without floppy or Windows

[Michael Firkins]

Hi.

For various reasons, (Mostly to do with some flaky stuff happening on
USB and IDE) I decided to update the bios on one of my machines. (It's a
MSI 845e msi 6566E). It has no floppy drive, and the only one still on
the premises doesn't work (it's leaving in the morning when the garbage
truck picks up). We also have no W98 machines, so bootdisks are hard to
come by.

There doesn't seem to be a current working and clear method of doing
this without Windows or MS-Dos, so with a bit of googling and
experimentation, I got it to work.

Bernd Blaauw has the closest thing to a working procedure on the freedos
mailing list archives. It's a bit scetchy, but knowing which files to
keep was the breakthrough for me: 

http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=8788743

Here's the method that worked for me:

Grab a freedos boot floppy image from www.freedos.org or mirrors

Create a mountpoint: mkdir /mnt/freedos

Mount it: mount -t vfat -o loop fdos1440.img /mnt/freedos

(you may need to 'modprobe loop' to get that to work).

Delete everything in /mnt/freedos EXCEPT kernel.sys and command.com

Download and unzip the relevant new BIOS for your machine, copy the bios
files and the update utility into the image:

-rwxr--r--  1 root root    433 Nov 19 00:02 6566e.txt
-rwxr--r--  1 root root  35328 Nov 19 00:02 How to flash the BIOS.doc
-rwxr--r--  1 root root 262144 Nov 19 00:01 a6566ims.610
-rwxr--r--  1 root root 541406 Nov 19 00:02 amifl827.EXE
-rwxr--r--  1 root root  64735 Aug 21 18:38 command.com
-rwxr--r--  1 root root  44140 Sep 27 15:20 kernel.sys

Unmount it: umount /mnt/freedos

Move the image into a suitable directory and build an iso image out of it:

mkdir bootflash
mv fdos1440.img bootflash/
mkisofs -o mybootflash.iso -b fdos1440.img ./bootflash/*

Burn the .iso and use it to boot the system. If all goes well, you will
get a date/time prompt, and a dos prompt from which you can run your
update program. It worked for me, once I had discovered the bios switch
to turn off bios protection...

Please Note: This worked for me. If you try this, and you break your
system, that's too bad. You can destroy your motherboard with a bad
flash, or the wrong bios file, but you will get to keep both (broken)
pieces. Don't try it if you don't need to, or you aren't prepared to
take on the risk, etc. etc.

Regards,

Michael

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